So on android in 2010 I used to be into the idea of rooting my phone, and installing custom roms.

Distros are essentially custom roms for your pc. Same concept.

There was a program called TWRP that I could use. Back then it would make a full backup of EVERYTHING on your internal drive. It was mostly used after you already had a custom rom.

But it backedup EVERYTHING. If you wrote a txt message as a draft, and didn’t sent it, then backed up with TWRP, whenever you restored on a new phone, that txt draft was there too. It was literally like your phone took an all encompassing picture of everything on your phones internal drive, every single file and setting, and made a backup. Saving it to your sd card.

So I’m thinking, linux should theoretically be able to do this. Maybe it does.

What if my current install is on a 250gb drive, and I buy a completely different 4TB drive? What if I want to do this total backup, save the backup to a usb hard drive, then put in a NEW hard drive, and have it restore the backup so now my entire old hard drive is now on my new hard drive? And every setting, every file, every last detail is an exact replica.

Could I do that?

  • MangoPenguin@lemmy.blahaj.zoneEnglish
    141·
    7 days ago

    Yes of course, any software that makes a full image of your drive will do this. dd is the old school and very manual way of doing this. But there are programs like Veeam Agent or Rescuezilla that make it much easier.

    • Lost_My_Mind@lemmy.worldOPEnglish
      41·
      7 days ago

      Really don’t understand the one guy downvoting you. This seems like helpful advice, considering my lack of knowledge.

      Unless it’s because Veeam Agent costs money. But that’s nitpicky. Costing money is for ME to decide if it’s a deal breaker. I mean, for me it is, but you giving that advice shouldn’t be downvoted. For others it may not be.

      And RescueZilla according to google is just a gui front of dd. So that sounds like my best option.